


Faith in Nights

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Communication, Getting Together, Leadership, M/M, Post-TLJ, learning things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 08:47:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17846219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: After the retreat from Crait, Poe's always brightly lit.Regrouping, failing, and caring for one another, the people of the Resistance learn what's possible.





	Faith in Nights

On Yavin 4, at the turns of the seasons from rainy to dry and from dry to rainy, the nights get cool and bright and peaceful. Settlers collect the old growth of fast-growing ilec and whatever wooden things have broken since last time and pile them up in the courtyards to burn, to drink and dance around, to bank for the next night, three nights running or while the liquor holds out.

“You in a hurry for Bonfire Night?” Kes or Atash or Nadiine would tease Poe when he elbowed a doorframe or kicked a chair, more and more often now since he started growing. He'd duck out under cover of a scowl, go out to the forest and climb until he was scratched and breathless and could smell nothing but the green-gold moss that grew where the light started to sift through the canopy, where the branches were getting too thin for him now and tiny blue-green ants bit him on the arm when they noticed him. Nothing felt right and nothing was right, and it wasn't _fair_ that he had to wait until he was sixteen to start at the Academy, and shouldn't he be done missing Shara by now?

When he wasn't in the trees he was in the scrap lot, where he'd hauled her A-wing with the help of the draught vicui from the next ranch over and hoisted her up on blocks. There he and Amal and Arnoosh and Serge and Le bickered and troubleshot, shared heat guns and scraps of wire and spice snuck from their parents' or grandparents' stashes, got filthy with the glittering grease of craft that might, one day, break atmo again.

On the first Bonfire Night when Poe was fifteen, the five of them were lined up on a rough half-circle of crates that would later join the flames. Amal was next to him, trying to blow smoke rings that were lost in the greater wafts of smoke and sparks, and Poe was itchy, restless, kept shifting, feeling his thigh rub against Amal's, freezing at the feeling, shifting again when he couldn't stand it.

It was getting late. The veterans, Kes and his lovers included, were singing a very detailed Rebellion song about Imperials' poor hygiene practices. Amal got to his feet, stretching, and Poe felt his gut clench with disappointment, without really knowing what he was disappointed about.

“You wanna go for a walk?” Amal said, sounding like someone trying to sound casual, and Poe's throat leapt like a knot of sap burning.

And so now when Poe thinks of the beginning of something, that's what he thinks of: stepping out of a bright circle into darkness, being followed, following.

 

*

 

After the retreat from Crait, Poe's always brightly lit. He feels remorse, now, for the way he looked at Leia: the way his eye was on her even when he couldn't see her, steering by her, fixing her in place.

He does what leaders do, what he knows to do from watching her. He calls in favors. He gives instructions. Most of all, he takes advice. Some of the people who've joined them now fought in the last war, and some have fought in wars that Poe only vaguely heard about because they weren't between humanoid species at all, but in sectors where humans never go. But the First Order is creeping, spreading, arc lights and gleaming armor. These peoples want to talk to the Resistance now, and Poe is there to listen to them.

“What do you have that they're coming after?” he asks, and the cephalopod turns its lithe body and seaweedy tentacles to the young Togruta translator, whose translation gloves flutter in response. “They want to know what you mean,” she says. “Following?”

“No. Sorry. Coming after, like—coming for. To take.”

“Okay.” The gloves again. “Minerals,” she tells Poe. “On land, so the Oa Ruripi didn't really see the problem.” Facing the screen and away from her principle, she makes what he thinks is a sympathetic grimace. “But now they've exhausted the reserves—reserves?—and they want to start mining the seabed.”

He's not sure why the Order would have gone after an inhabited planet when asteroids abound. He's only too familiar with the Oa Ruripi's delay, not reacting until the Order's operations threatened them personally. “They don't know when to stop,” he agrees, instead. “How do you think we can help you? And how do you think you can help us?”

Negotiations through a translator are awful and, predictably, inconclusive, and after the call ends he starts thinking about who he can send to deal in person. C'ai might know someone, but the nonhumanoid fighters are understandably touchy when asked about people who aren't their own species and don't even share an important trait, like tunnel-dwelling or crepuscularity.

Speaking of tunnels, being trapped on Crait freaked him right the hell out, and here they are quartered in another underground base. The central passages are shored up by some kind of cement that BB-8 informs him has an organic origin, repaired here and there with duracrete lattice; the side branches are packed earth. He turns down one of these now in a kind of perverse attempt to confront himself with the dampness, the apparent solidity and the miniature starfield of ongoing life and death just beyond where his palm rests. Apparently Kes's harangues about soil ecology stuck after all. Life is such a busy and such a thin presence, everywhere in the galaxy.

 

*

 

Sometimes, when one wavering holo blinks out, he has a few minutes before the next meeting, so he sits and watches Rey and Finn spar, beam against beam.

“Damn,” says Rose, settling beside him on another crate and smoothing the legs of her coverall. Military crates haven't changed much since the Bonfire Nights of his childhood: the splinters find ways of reminding you that they're there. “They're really something. You know, before I met Finn, I thought he was so great. And then I met him when he was trying to sneak away”—they both laugh about that story, now; Poe is mostly just glad it didn't work—“and I was like, 'This guy isn't a hero at all, he's a bum.' And then I thought he _was_ a hero, but a dumbass hero, trying to die for us like that. And now—” she falls quiet, as the two fighters extinguish their blades and lean against each other cracking up.

“Now?” Poe asks, against his worse or at least his surlier inclinations.

Rose shrugs. “Now I think he's great,” she says. “Don't you?”

The combatants weave their way over, Rey's feral stride and Finn's more percussive grace abandoned, their delight in their strength and in each other slopping over into their gaits. Poe feels approximately one billion eons old and made of crumbling ship's insulation.

Rey squats on the balls of her feet in front of the crates, and Finn reaches over to tug Rose's ponytail. Poe can _smell_ him, feel the warmth coming from him, the life radiating around him. “I gotta go talk to this contact of Lando's that might have some munitions for us,” he says. “Finn, give an old man a hand up.”

“Sure, gramps,” Finn says, eyerolling and holding out a palm, lightsaber blisters crossing blaster calluses. For all he's sweating, his grip is dry, and the muscle and leverage in it lifts more than Poe's body.

“What's the point of getting old if you can't do shit like that,” he says over his shoulder on the way to the makeshift holobooth, just in case Finn missed the point the first time. He pushes his way through the tarps and blankets they've hung, composes himself, pushes in the coordinates for the call.

By the end of it, the Resistance is five thousand, nine hundred and twenty credits poorer and five payloads richer—now if they only had five bombers to put them in—and Poe feels like he's lost six percent of his body weight in sweat. Not all of his skills as a negotiator play well over the holowaves, and he has to work harder to put it across, whatever “it” is, that thing that has nothing to do with the true flicker and shift and dance of working _with_ someone, not trying to win but to move toward something together.

Then there's the other part of the war, the part that he takes on trust from Rey, and from Finn as her—student? Disciple? Adjutant? He'd tried “padawan,” and Rey said gravely that that was more like what _she_ was, only she didn't have anyone to be it to anymore, and then she looked sad, which Poe really just couldn't stand.

Finn's not the only one: a few of the people who've joined them here came because in recent days they'd felt something stirring in them that they didn't entirely understand, or were thrilled by or frightened of, or had always called by another name. But he's by far the fastest learner, combining what Rey remembers of her training with his own frankly staggering discipline and work ethic, his excellent ( _really_ excellent) physical condition, and something that very few of the new recruits _or_ the veterans have: an openness, a trust, a joy in stretching toward what's new and possible, even before he knows whether he can reach it.

Poe is in awe of that—would be no matter what Finn was applying it to, probably—and he's impressed in spite of himself by what the other Force-sensitive recruits can do. There's still something about the training that bothers him, but he can't articulate it, and there's so much else that needs his attention, and Rey and Finn seem to have a good grip on it (and he doesn't want to be a third wheel) and what does he know about the Force anyway (and he doesn't want them to look at him like he's an idiot for suggesting something they've already thought of), and so he lets them handle it.

The team of Gungan saboteurs they finally induce Naboo to send to the Oa Ruripi do solid work: destabilizing derricks and wells, making a few choice drownings look accidental. Two bombers materialize, old Imperial crates that somehow survived several rounds of regime change, and Rose leads a round-the-clock team to get them into fighting shape. Rey, with a layer of shyness over a hard bright beam of pride, invites Poe to view the trainees' progress. In the warrenlike base's largest burrow, he watches them take turns working through forms and sparring and yes, lifting rocks. Not all of them have lightsabers, of course; they're working with long vibroblades or with quarterstaves like the one Rey brought with her from exile.

“They look good,” he says.

“But?” Finn says on the other side of him. Finn's particularly alert, Poe's noticed, to tiny nuances in tone. He's seen that before, usually in people who've had to live under the control of someone violent and unpredictable. That Finn lives with that and still manages to trust and trust again is nothing short of a marvel.

Right. Finn asked him a question. Which he now has to answer with a question of his own: “How are they at working together?”

“They're good,” Finn says. Poe doesn't miss the hint of relief—that Poe asked something he could answer in the affirmative, probably—just before Finn calls out a syllable that holds, for Poe, no meaning. 

Obviously it means something to the recruits, though: they move into formation, and Poe can _feel_ the air change, charge. As they move in unison, his skin prickles: is that good or bad? There's a sense of immense effort, and what he thought was a part of the cavern wall heaves into the air. When they set it down, he's panting too.

At the end of the session, the recruits still seem a little constrained, but Poe can see they're talking with each other, standing a little apart. “Cohesion's decent,” Finn says, close beside him and picking up on his thought in a way that Poe could attribute to the Force but is probably just good command sense. “Not as good as it could be, but not bad. You thinking of using us separately or together? You haven't said.”

 _Using us._ Poe can't tell if it's colder or just more honest. “It depends,” he says truthfully. They're waiting for reports from scouts near Tolle. “If they make a landing and it's straight ground fighting, we might want you to mix in. If,” he still has to swallow when he says it, “Kylo Ren is with them—” He stops. “Is this crowd up to that?”

“Rey is,” Finn says, unshakeable. “Are you trying to figure out if it's best to use us as, like, really good fighters or as...” He pulses his hand in midair, the galactically recognized handsign for _weird Force shit._

“Yeah, I guess that's what I'm asking.” Though that doesn't feel like quite the right question, either. “Do you think you could stop a ship from entering orbit? All of you together?”

 

*

 

The coordinates and the flight plans are set. The asteroid that will provide cover for the Force users’ craft, the _Windu_ , is projected to be in the correct position by the time they reach it. BB-8 has bumped Rey’s knees with his crown, given Finn a lighter-fluid thumbs up, and settled himself in their new X-wing’s housing. Rey’s at the controls of the _Windu_ , and Finn is about to board.

“Hey,” Poe says. “You got this.”

Finn frowns, half-turned with one foot on the ramp. “Hope so.”

“C’mere,” Poe says, and pulls him into a tight hug. For a second he thinks maybe it’s a bad idea, too much like a grav-ball coach trying to build player morale. But Finn holds him tightly in return, takes a deep harsh breath, says, “See you back here,” and ascends the ramp.

The Star Destroyer with its TIE escort emerges from hyperspace just where their intel said it would be, a few hundred kilometers short of orbit around Tolle, and the squadrons move in to engage the TIEs. It’s the kind of flying Poe loves, and the kind he knows the others love him for: fast, sharp, and dangerous. There aren’t enough of them to take this many fighters out entirely, but that’s why the Force users are there: immobilizing the larger craft will give Poe and the others the chance to get past the escort and do enough damage to force a retreat before they can reach orbit and send troops down to the surface.

“On my mark,” Poe says, dodges, “now, Rey.”

In his peripheral vision the Star Destroyer wobbles.

On his monitors, it rights itself, and keeps moving toward planetfall.

There are no more wobbles, no more halts, and the ion cannons are charging.

“Black Leader,” says C’ai in Poe’s ear.

“Let’s take out some of those troop transports,” Poe says. _“Windu,_ can you stop one or two of those? Force or firepower, I don’t care.”

“Copy,” Rey says, and he can hear the rage and self-contempt in her voice.

“C’ai and I can draw fire, Black Leader,” Pava says.

“Do it. Rest of you, move in when they start sending ships down. This is one and done. You make a hit, you book it back to the rendezvous. We’re doing damage control here.”

He probably shouldn’t have said that last part. Live or die, there’s no point to it. But the transports are away, two fighters have peeled off to draw the cannons’ fire, and BB-8 is correcting their projectile trajectory for the ionosphere’s gravity.

They hit only seven of more than thirty trooper transports. In the hyperlane, BB-8 wants to know what went wrong.

“Not sure, buddy,” Poe says, his anger slightly tempered by the fact that there were no Resistance losses. “We’ll figure that out back at base.”

The hangar is a shallow, well-ventilated cavern just below the surface. He joins the others in venting exhaust, checking for damage, punching orange-clad shoulders and thighs in the well-worn rituals of coming back alive. It doesn't dissipate the anger, but it helps him restore his equilibrium and prepare him to do one of the _other_ things that leaders do.

“So what happened?” He says it much more gently than he meant to or even thinks is warranted, because their respective postures are scaring him. Rey looks braced for the next blow. Finn is rigid, at attention, looking at Poe in a way that he doesn’t want anyone to look at him, ever.

“We don’t know,” Rey says, and it’s almost a relief to hear that there’s still defiance in her voice. “We tried and tried to figure it out on the way back. We did it exactly how we practiced.”

“You gotta figure it out. What you can do together, what your limits are. Or else figure out another way to help. We were lucky to make it back today.” He needs them to understand that. But another glance tells him they already do. “And we did make it back,” he says. “So that’s good. Go catch your breath, get your bearings, talk to your people. We’ll talk again at chow time.”

Once Finn’s gaze leaves him it doesn’t come back. When the two of them have followed the other Force users down to the practice hall, Poe presses the heels of his hands into his eyesockets. Beside him, BB-8 makes his “concern” noise and rocks, and Poe reaches a hand out to steady him.

He finds Finn in the chow room later, the big reinforced chamber where rations are stored and doled out. Rey’s nowhere to be seen; she’s probably self-soothing by taking an engine apart.

Finn’s back is to one of the duracrete lattices, which can’t be comfortable. Poe tucks away a sick feeling that maybe that’s on purpose, and sits down next to him. “Hey,” he says. “You here?”

“Yeah,” Finn says, but it takes him a while. “That…was bad.”

“What was?”

Finn looks at him like he’s fully lost it. “The _mission?_ There’s kind of a difference between stopping a Star Destroyer and not stopping it at all.”

“No argument,” Poe says. “But you also could’ve been talking about what happened to you when you came in for debrief. You looked like shit. Is that gonna happen every time?”

“Every time I make a mistake like that? There won't be any more—”

“Of course there will.”

Now Finn is staring straight ahead, ration bar half-unwrapped and forgotten in his lap, and that look that Poe hated is coming back. “You really think that about me.”

“No,” Poe says. “Fuck! I think it about everybody. I think it about _me.”_

He’s remembering the retreat, but also the negotiations of the past few cycles: the egos and the miscommunications. The money he’s lost for them, and the allies, and the lives. He wrenches himself away from that to the person who’s sitting next to him right now, needing something. “I don't want you to—” That's not right either. “Is there a way I can tell you? That something you're doing—that you need to change it? Without—”

Finn takes a long and ragged breath, lets it out on a shudder. Poe tries to take the next one with him. It takes a few more before a rhythm settles over them, into them.

“The thing is,” Finn says after a while, “I don't really know what to do with this either.”

“With what?” Poe's shoulder notes that Finn's shoulder has become pressed against it in the course of the breathing process. The rest of Poe definitely doesn't know what to do with that, but that's probably not what Finn's talking about.

“See, the thing you're doing right now is a thing that you're pretty much the only person who's ever done,” Finn says. “To me. Wait, that was confusing.”

“No, I got you.”

“The other thing—reaming me out or whatever—no, don't interrupt, I know what you actually said, I'm just talking about how I, how I reacted—that's normal. I reacted how I _would_ react. That's what I know how to do.” He's slowing down now, not fighting as hard to get the words out, letting them fall with more measure. “It affected me how it _would_ affect me. How they wanted it to affect me. But you're talking about changing what you do so I can change what I do. I like the idea. I like the question. But--”

Poe wants to say, “But you don't know what the answer is,” because that's where that sentence is almost certainly going. He concentrates on not saying anything, on waiting. His least favorite thing, and it seems like he's doing more and more of it these days. For real reasons! Important reasons! But it's so frustrating and he finds himself thinking, as he often thinks during negotiations, _If I could just do it for you—_

“But I don't know what the answer is,” Finn says. “I want to, but I don't.”

Poe doesn't rush to say that it's okay. (In a way, he never wants to say that again, about anything.) He says, “Will you think about it? I mean, if you're gonna be thinking about it, can you try to think about it like that?”

Another deep, slow breath. “Yeah,” Finn says. He looks down at the hand with the ration bar in it. “I should probably eat the rest of this, it's not gonna get any less dry and crumbly.”

“Okay. Want me to leave you to it?”

“Nah. Stay. Can you?”

“For a minute,” Poe says.

Later, before trying to settle in for sleep, he wraps himself in one of the medics' thermal blankets and takes the long, sloping tunnel to the surface. The blanket is mainly to mask his heat signature, but he's also grateful for it against the damp, raw cold. The cloud cover, at least here near the poles, is low-lying and close to permanent. But it's outside air, air that brings with it bigger shifts and changes than he feels can happen underground. He takes a lungful of it back down with him.

 

*

 

“We figured it out,” Rey says. “Sort of.”

For the past few days, Poe's carefully stayed away from the Force training sessions and even from Rey and Finn's combat practice. He's been working with Leia on an approach to the Pentavirate of the Ku Fove System, and that's been a good excuse not to breathe down their necks. He's seen them, though, seen tense dialogues in the corridor loosen day by day into energetic discussions. Now, facing him, they're tense again. He hates it.

“I've always had to work on my own,” Rey says. “Even with Luke, a lot of that was him being surly in his hut and me trying to run with the bits of things he'd tell me. And we never actually tried to do anything _together._ And Finn—I should let you say your part.”

“Command structure,” Finn says, almost shrugging. “People told me what to do, I did it.”

“So that's how we trained our people,” Rey picks up again. “A mix of the worst of that.”

They're loosening up again, entering their dance. It's a pleasure to see. “It's like lifting a proton cannon. If everybody just lifts their end as high as they can when the person in charge says, 'Lift,' it's inefficient and it's dangerous, you're gonna hurt yourself or drop it or both.”

“And that's what we did with the ship.”

“So everybody needs to know how much everybody else is doing, and balance what they're doing against that.”

“But we don't know how to do that,” Rey finishes up, her ebullience wilting a little. “Because...we don't know how to do it. If we knew how--”

“Rey,” Finn says affectionately, “he gets it.”

Poe does, in fact, get it, and he likes that Finn can see that, but he's fresh out of suggestions. He _does_ know how to work together—in a way, that's the heart of what he knows, how to fly in complement, how to take on his share, how to draw out what someone else can do. Partly it's how he was raised: surrounded, pulled on, nudged and loved from all directions. Partly it's what other people needed from him, and so it's what he became.

He can see how it happened _to_ him, but he doesn't really know how he _does_ it—anymore, probably, than Rey and Finn know how they do what they do. Or how to _not_ do what they do. Damn.

He gives them a short and hopefully more coherent version of this, suggests that they keep working and thinking and that especially Rey should think whether Luke told her anything that might help however indirectly, and goes to find Emmel and Arjuna, who are seconding him at the next holo-meeting.

A big part of his energy these last few days, now that everyone's rested, has been to create some redundancy in his own tasks and responsibilities. Poe wants there to be more than one person who can do what he does if he gets blown into space debris, or, hell, picks up blood poisoning or lung rot or—the point is that he'd be no kind of leader at all if he led from the sidelines _and_ he'd be no kind of leader if he didn't make way for people to lead in his place.

That doesn't leave very many kinds of leader for him to be.

He's sitting up late with Leia, hammering out the final details of their request to the Pentavirate and taking turns with a vacuum mug of burntroot tea. It's supposed to be a good caf substitute but tastes the way it sounds, even with some of their precious store of sweetener added. She's wrapped in shawls and blankets; she feels the cold.

“That might be as good as we can get it,” she says, her voice more gravelly than usual with tiredness. “And it could still depend on who we talk to first. Kar Reaumu”—the Premier of Fove II—“is probably the most farsighted. I haven't had any dealings with Kin Tara, but her mother was way off the rails when we were both in the Senate.” Leia shakes her head with a heavy sway, and gestures with her stylus at the mug. “I should've laid off that swill an hour ago. I don't think I can sleep.”

They're peers, now, technically, unless Poe were to take point on a mission that she was part of. But he won't be going with her to Ku Fove. The Pentavirate still believe in rank. Even more than with General Organa or Senator Emeritus Organa, they want to talk with Princess Leia, late of Alderaan. “I could still make you a Duke of the Realm,” she says, bringing back a joke from earlier in their planning sessions. “I did that for Han one time.”

“What for?”

She smiles with a warmth he hasn't seen in a while. “Get him out of jail on a planet where the nobility couldn't be convicted by a jury of commoners. I don't think he ever forgave me for it.”

“From what I remember, he'd make a terrible duke.”

“So would you.”

He knows it's a compliment, and at the same time he remembers her, silvered by space, fighting off her own death because the war wasn't over for her yet. If that's not queenly, what is? “I have a Force question,” he says. “I don't know how much you know about the Tolle mission.”

“I know everything about the Tolle mission,” she says. “I know everything we're working on. Is it that it didn't occur to you to send them to me, or that you did but they ignored you?”

Poe's stomach sours with shame around the dregs of tea. “First one. I just thought of it right now.”

“Better late than never,” she says, and he wonders what else she's thinking of.

So the next day, he suggests to Rey that at least she and Finn, and maybe a couple of the others who are most confident, talk with General Organa. From her expression, it hadn't occurred to her either, and he realizes he hasn't seen them interact much. He knows that Leia has confidence in Rey, trusts her—she's shown it—but he doesn't know if it's mutual.

What he does know is that Leia begins attending some of the Force practice sessions. “Entrainment,” she calls what they're doing, according to Finn. Poe didn't even know that was a word, but when he sits in on a session a few days later, he can feel the difference on his skin, like a shift in humidity when the season changes.

The boulder rises to about the height it did before, if you were to get out a measuring tape, but more slowly, with a more constant wobble. And when the Force users are moving around each other, eyes closed, breathing, it's less a matter of unison, more of complement. When one trips on a divot in the cavern floor, another catches him without her eyelids so much as twitching.

Something is happening there, and whatever it is makes Poe feel more comfortable concentrating on briefing the rest of the Ku Fove team with the plan that he and Leia developed. Rose is seconding—her first time—and she's vibratory with nerves, but underneath it there's the steady core of principle he's come to recognize and respect. She knows where to draw the line because she knows where the line already, truly, is. Talking with her about the minutiae of their requests, about what to do if things go sour, about how to support Leia by pushing back against her just a little—it brushes away the debris and helps him see the line too, feel it, firm and bright.

The Ku Fove team is three days out when scouts on Phrastis Major confirm that the First Order has dammed the river that bisects the northern continent, reducing and contaminating the water supply downstream and “precipitating” (Poe can't resist saying in the general briefing, but no one gets it) the rise of an underground. They've attempted to mine the dams with no success, and Finn confirms that the Order often builds endothermic dampeners into large-scale construction.

Rey's idea is that the Force might not care about endothermic dampeners, and she actually talks Poe into adding them to his next munitions request so she can try to prove it. That gives the Force users time to practice, in her absence, whatever it is that Leia was teaching them. It gives Poe time to talk with Finn about leading the mission, as the person in whom Force abilities and inside knowledge of the enemy overlap. And it gives them time to eat together more often, to confer on tactics, to start piecing together a way to communicate that doesn't send Finn into a tailspin or make Poe feel like a totalitarian monster. Of all the things he's had to learn on the fly recently, this is the one he feels the best about.

When the _Windu_ is preparing for takeoff, they hug each other more calmly, and for longer, than they did before, as if to insist: this won't be a repeat of last time. This feels different.

Rey stays behind when the Phrastis Major mission leaves, on the grounds that it's probably good to have at least one person who's notably strong with the Force backing up the core of their small-f forces. Poe invites her to second him on a couple of holocalls, and she duly shows up, but doesn't contribute much. “Hey,” he says when they disconnect with a very blurry Rose Tico, reporting tentative but not really heartening progress with Kar Reaumu's court. “You doing okay?”

“I miss Leia,” she says, surprising him, but also answering his internal question about how they were getting along. “She's—” She rubs her eyebrows with both hands, something he's noticed she does when she's stuck for words. “She's a good teacher.”

“She is,” Poe says, seeing the past few years stretch out behind him, bright light picking out the sharp shadows of everything she taught him, whether he wanted to learn it or not.

The Ku Fove team returns a few days later with less than they hoped for but more than they left with, including a promise to support an offensive in the adjacent, First Order-controlled sector. The debriefings and general reports take days, and Rose reluctantly agrees to return in two cycles to keep a hand on the controls of the new alliance. “This isn't really my style,” she confides to Poe in their first conference, while Leia sleeps. “I like it when I can take a wrench to something. If you can't turn it maybe you can smack it.”

“That's not a bad description of diplomacy.”

He feels like he ought to get at least a _little_ laugh for that, but she just eyes him. “It's not your style either, is it?”

“Does it show that much?”

“Sometimes.” She doesn't bother pulling her punches, another thing he's come to appreciate about her. “If you have to pick something to worry about, don't pick that. Pick that Ker Sitat probably started her whisper campaign against the alliance with the Resistance before the exhaust clouds cleared.”

“I could worry about the Phrastis Major mission,” Poe offers, feeling like he's picking at something but not sure what the something is. Finn's keeping comms dark on Phrastis Major for safety reasons, and the window for the sabotage was full of variables: getting across country, making contact with the underground. There isn't anything to do but wait and trust. The second, he's surprised to find, is easy. The first continues to be hard as hell.

 

*

 

Some enterprising soul has discovered a colony of edible fungi in one of the side tunnels and even volunteered to eat one, just to check. When they didn't start hallucinating or purging or falling into a coma, they came back with a tarp and gathered about two-thirds of what was left, enough to make the rehydrated juca and grain porridge from the last provisions drop taste like real food.

Poe and the rest of the pilots still on site get tapped by this tenday's mess crew to separate the caps from the stringy stems: boring but peaceful work, easy to settle to now that they know the Phrastis Major team has landed. In the chow room, they form a rough circle around the three heaps of stems, caps and not-yet-done ones, making fun of each other's technique. Rose is taking a sparkwrench to her taser, to “juice it up a little.” Rey and the two youngest Force users, Indira and Sophorn, are floating a crumpled-up manifest back and forth: her face is as open and absorbed as theirs, and their makeshift ball casts little puffs of shadow in the flicker of the besh-grade cool lights.

Finn appears in the doorway, followed closely by Sendep, another Force user from the mission. They're talking, but when Finn sees Poe seeing him he checks, briefly, before moving the rest of the way into the room and squatting beside him.

“How'd it go?” Poe asks. 

“Good,” Finn says. “Clean. You want the full report, or you wanna finish doing this first?”

“I can do this and listen.”

Finn seems about to speak, then stops, then says, “Actually can we go in the corridor?”

“Sure,” Poe says, getting to his feet. “Of course.” He concentrates on the pain of unfolding his knees in order to keep from anticipating whatever it is that Finn doesn't want to say in front of the rest of the room.

They sink down against the packed-earth corridor wall. “Thanks,” Finn says, before Poe can ask what's wrong. “I just wanted to run this by you before I got into it with everybody else.”

“Oh. Okay, sure. Tell me.”

Finn is obviously tired, but he gives the background concisely: their team's arrival and contact with the local rebels, a few details of conditions on the ground that their informants hadn't thought to mention. When he's gotten them as far as the edge of the dam, he hesitates. “I didn't think we could do it,” he said. “But Sendep was on it, she did all of the entrainment, the way that General Organa showed us. And it worked.” He lifts a hand—just visible in the tunnel's dim light—to show how the dam _wavered,_ then folded down into itself.

“That's _amazing,”_ Poe said. “Amazing, Finn.”

“It swept out their camp just like we wanted, _and_ it took out their comms tower. The ones who were left, we just picked 'em off in the canyons.”

“Amazing,” Poe says again. “Wait, what about that didn't you want to tell everybody? That's a rousing success. They'll be thrilled. _I'm_ thrilled.”

“Didn't say I didn't want to tell everybody,” Finn says, leaning closer. “I just wanted to tell you first.”

Finn's mouth is soft and sidelong, the tentative kiss of a tired man. Poe is too surprised at first to even bring up an arm to put around him. But he kisses back, with the sense that everything he's been missing is falling into place.

They kiss until Poe's neck hurts. One of Finn's hands is settled at his waist, and Finn's breath is warm and humid as he murmurs, “Is this gonna make everything more complicated?”

“Maybe. Probably.” Poe thinks about all the things it could make more complicated while they kiss some more. “But—”

“I still wanna do it.”

“Me too.”

“We should probably get back, they're gonna think something went wrong.”

“Yeah,” Poe says, not moving except to kiss the corner of Finn's mouth. “Okay.”

Finn smiles into the kiss, stands, and holds a hand out for Poe to grab. It's like being lifted all the way into the air and not quite coming back down.

Poe glances down the corridor, his mind racing through the maze of tunnels and chambers, scouting out dark corners for the two of them to join each other in. Running through all the things he has to do that will keep him away from those corners, that darkness, this touch, through a hundred ramifications of everything he wants and fears to feel for Finn and with him, horniness and irritation and passion and exhaustion and contentment and world-shattering grief—

“Right behind you,” he says to Finn, who's headed back toward the soft glow cast on the floor from the chow room.

Finn stops, turns his whole self, stands open. “C'mon,” he says, and draws Poe to his side, and they walk in together to their friends and comrades.

 

 


End file.
